"You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing."
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Quote collection
Bonnie Jo Campbell quotes (page 2 of 4)
66 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty."
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"The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work."
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"My normal writing day involves three hours of actual writing, before noon, and the rest is just feeding the writing. There is teaching (so I can afford to write), travel to be planned and executed. There are dozens of emails daily, gardening, lots of dishes (where do all these dishes come from?), daily family emergencies, and, of course, the petting of the donkeys. The smell of donkeys is heavenly, and their he-honking is the sweetest music. I feel calm just thinking about them."
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"I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe."
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"I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them."
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"Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor."
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"I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns."
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"The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good."
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"Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician."
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"In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics. I was just about to earn my Master's along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time."
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"Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves. The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction."
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"I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck."
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"I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world."
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"That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea."
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"I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me."
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"I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns."
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"Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary."
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"In a regular class I don't focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material."
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"I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn't captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses."
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